Hauntings in the Hurricane

On September 16, 2005, the Bay Area television station CBS 5 broadcast a report (currently archived at http://cbs5.com/video/?id=6789@kpix.dayport.com) concerning a California National Guard unit, stationed at New Orleans' Sophie B. Wright Middle School, and its encounters with a ghostly little girl. The school, an imposing edifice erected in 1912, is located on Napoleon Avenue in the city's Uptown neighborhood.

The report featured two members of the unit who saw the apparition, and a third who heard her laughter when opening a closet containing cleaning supplies. The events prompted a National Guard chaplain to perform a rite of exorcism. CBS 5 reporter Janet Yee also mentioned seeing a "cloud" in an empty restroom.

A September 21 Washington Post article by Manuel Roig-Franzia profiled devastation in Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish, downstream from New Orleans. Roig-Franzia quoted John Barthelemy, a parish councilman: "On the night before the storm, Barthelemy says quite seriously, a good friend of his walked home with a whole pack of ghosts. Barthelemy asked him if he was scared, and the man replied, 'What they gonna do? The dead can't hurt me.'"

On the same night, parish resident Lynell Williams "saw two lines of ghosts — 'bright people,' she noted, invoking a local colloquialism for whites — marching over the levee. The ghosts were getting out...."

When the ghosts evacuate, it's probably time to leave.